Act of Darkness

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor, on the other hand, had never come to any personal harm by the actions of any particular politician. He had never even been treated badly by one. He had known four presidents—Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan—and they had all been genial, gracious and solicitous men, at least while he was watching them. And that, in the end, had been the problem. At least while he was watching them. Sometimes Gregor thought he hadn’t escaped at all from the peasant voodoo mentality of the immigrant household in which he’d grown up. He’d simply shifted the focus of his dread from random and inexplicable disasters to the persons of the men who made the calculated deliberations on Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill.

  He turned his head away from the window—he wasn’t paying attention to the scenery anyway; it was all hot and sweaty and tired and cramped—and looked at Bennis, sitting with her legs stretched out across the center aisle and her stocking feet propped onto the rumble seat. It was, Gregor realized, the first time he had ever seen her “dressed.” He didn’t think it suited her. She had abandoned her ubiquitous jeans for a Chanel suit and her usual stuck-up-any-which-way top-of-the-head knot for a professionally constructed chignon, but she still sat and moved like someone who didn’t have to worry that her posture might expose her underwear. He thought she would probably correct that when they got to Great Expectations, because Bennis was always so good at adapting herself to her environment. He didn’t think he was going to like the change when it came.

  He tapped the stack of papers on her lap and said, “How’s it going? You don’t seem to have gotten very far.”

  The papers were the copyedited manuscript of the novel Bennis had delivered to her publisher barely two weeks before the mess had started out in Bryn Mawr, the case that had brought her and Gregor Demarkian together. To say she hadn’t gotten very far with it was gross understatement. They had been traveling for two days, and she was barely a third of the way through.

  Now she frowned dubiously at the papers, shook her head, and put them away from her, beside her on the seat. Then she looked at Gregor and sighed.

  “I got a fanatic,” she said. “Every time I used the generic ‘he,’ she changed it to ‘he or she.’ Every time the knight in shining armor saved the damsel in distress, she wrote, ‘Change this please. Sexist.’ I mean, for God’s sake. The idiot thing is set in 1153.”

  “Do you have a lot of that kind of trouble with your books?”

  “I didn’t used to. I had a wonderful copyeditor for years, but she took a job as an editor at Random House. The new ones all think of themselves as the thought police.” Bennis bent over, got her handbag off the floor—more Chanel, Gregor noticed, wondering why he hadn’t noticed before—and got out her cigarettes. Smoking was one thing even Donna Moradanyan and Father Tibor hadn’t been able to talk Bennis out of.

  “What about you?” she asked him. “You’ve been looking sicker by the mile.”

  “I’ve been feeling sicker by the mile,” Gregor said. “I told you all about it back in Philadelphia.”

  “I just think it’s ridiculous, that’s all. You must have spent the last ten years of your career dealing with politicians.”

  “I also spent the last ten years of my career dealing with three simultaneous ulcers in three different parts of my body. And don’t say that was because Elizabeth was dying, because it wasn’t. Elizabeth’s dying gave me different physical symptoms altogether.”

  Bennis looked up at the ribbon of smoke curling out of her cigarette and the column of ash growing at the end of it and tapped out in the ashtray at her side. Mostly, they didn’t talk about Elizabeth, Gregor’s wife of thirty years, dead of cancer before they had ever met. They both acknowledged, tacitly, that they never would have met if Elizabeth hadn’t died, because if she hadn’t Gregor would never have resigned early from the FBI and come back to live on Cavanaugh Street, and if those things hadn’t happened—it was too complicated to go into. Like Bennis’s problems with her mother, dying slowly out in Bryn Mawr of multiple sclerosis, the subject of Elizabeth was too painful to turn into conversation.

  “The thing is,” Bennis said, “I’ve been going over and over this cover story you thought up, and I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “No?”

  “Stephen Fox isn’t the kind of candidate I’m likely to give money to. I mean, I do give money to candidates—”

  “You gave money to the Save the Minks Party in 1985 and the Snoopy for President Party in 1988.”

  “Well,” Bennis said, “that’s exactly what I mean. Stephen Fox is for real. He may even be for real for real. I mean, he may even get elected.”

  “He has been elected. He’s the senior senator from the state of Connecticut.”

  “I mean elected president. Good God, Gregor. I can’t even vote for presidents. I tried it once, in 1980. I voted for Carter over Reagan. Then I walked around feeling absolutely suicidal until I found out Reagan won.”

  “You wanted Reagan and you voted for Carter?”

  “I didn’t want either of them. I just figured that I voted for Carter and Reagan won, so no matter what Reagan did, at least it wasn’t my fault.”

  Stephen Fox isn’t going to be elected president if he keeps keeling over at cocktail parties. Which, as far as I can figure out from what Mr. Chester told me, seems to be becoming a habit.”

  “Maybe all that’s becoming a habit is getting drunk,” Bennis said. “I’ve heard all those politicians drink like fish. If I were a politician, I’d drink like one.”

  Actually, Gregor thought, he would bet that most politicians these days drank very little, if at all. There were too many specters to contend with, trailing along the banks of the Potomac in the alcoholic mummy-wrap of their ruined careers. Besides, what Dan Chester had told him about Stephen Fox didn’t sound like alcohol.

  “What I want from you,” he told Bennis, “is a fair job of acting. Just convince everybody that you think Stephen Fox will make Camelot rise again, and that should do.”

  “I don’t know how I’d feel about Camelot rising again. Considering what we know now.”

  “As far as you’re concerned, we don’t know anything now. Flash your money around. Flash your background around. Outdress the senator’s mother-in-law. And please, dear sweet Lord please, stay out of the rest of it.”

  “How?” Bennis demanded.

  “By using your common sense instead of your imagination, for once. I don’t like the way this sounds, Bennis. I think this could be dangerous.”

  Bennis shrugged. “You always say that. You went up to Colchester without me and you said that. So what? Out here, nobody’s even been murdered yet.”

  “If I find you within half a mile of Stephen Fox’s problem, somebody will be murdered and it will be you.”

  “Gregor! You sound just like a mystery book—”

  “Never mind what I sound like. Stay out of trouble. And if you have to call Tibor and Lida and George and Donna and all the rest of them, use your head and call on an outside phone. No matter what you have to do to get to one. And no matter what point in the middle of the night you’re supposed to call.”

  Bennis bit her lip, and looked away. “I think I’ll go back to work again,” she said. “I’m not getting anything done.”

  It was true that she wasn’t getting anything done, but it was also true that she didn’t want him to get a look at her face. Gregor went back to looking out the window, so that Bennis would have a chance to relax. Soon, he thought, their relationship was going to have to change. It didn’t have to be a big change—no matter what Lida Arkmanian thought, he didn’t want to take the child to bed; he didn’t want to take any woman to bed, and if he someday changed his mind the object of his affections was going to be someone like Lida herself, a woman of his own generation. It was just that he and Bennis had, through no fault of their own, gotten locked into roles that didn’t fit them well. He didn’t like playing the stolid, pragmatic, disapproving father figure. She, he was sure, didn’t
like playing the madcap heiress sidekick. It was just that, with everything they knew about each other and everything they had been through together, they were finding it impossible to be themselves in each other’s company.

  Outside his window, Queens had dissolved into a small town made up entirely of tiny ranch houses on quarter-acre plots, dozens and dozens of them arranged in rows like broken waves frozen in their march to a seashore. The sun, even at eight o’clock in the morning, was high and hot and bright. The highway ramp swung above a little cluster of commercial buildings and Gregor read the digital sign outside a bank: 78°.

  Someday, he knew, he was going to have to come to terms with it all: Bennis, and Elizabeth, and politicians, and his ambivalence about Carl Bettinger, his old “friend” from the FBI who had pulled him into Stephen Fox’s problem. Gregor was the kind of man who tried not to analyze his life, and because of that he was also the kind of man who woke up on inconvenient mornings to find he had a lot to analyze. He wondered what Bennis would think, if he told her that. Father Tibor would simply say, “Of course.”

  He looked back at Bennis and found she had abandoned her manuscript once again. This time, she was putting everything she had into the examination of a catalog of children’s clothes.

  The catalog had been issued by Laura Ashley, and Gregor was willing to bet there wasn’t a bib in it for less than $100.

  [2]

  Ten minutes later, just as a raft of clouds drifted across the sun and turned the landscape dark, Gregor Demarkian fell asleep. He had his head thrown back against the seat, his legs crossed neatly ankle-to-knee, and his hands folded in his lap. Looking at him, Bennis wondered for the thousandth time how men could wear wool even in the summer.

  Bennis shifted her manuscript again from her lap to the seat, then put her head back and closed her eyes. It was all well and good to pretend she was having a hard time working because the copyeditor was an idiot. The copyeditor was an idiot, but she could have been the reincarnation of Maxwell Perkins and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Bennis was distracted, that was the problem, and she didn’t think even finding a dead body in her bedroom closet would do much to drag her attention away from all the things she had left back in Philadelphia.

  What she had left was formidable: one of her brothers was about to go on trial for insider trading and securities fraud, one of her sisters was about to go on trial for murder, and her mother was dying. She hadn’t told Gregor that—hadn’t told anyone, in fact, just how bad Cordelia Day Hannaford had become—but it was true. There was another month, maybe six weeks, to go. Then Cordelia would be dead and the house would belong to Yale University and the life she had known would disappear. It was odd, considering how terrible that life had been, that she was so afraid to see it go.

  Bennis jerked her head forward, opened her eyes, and grabbed for her purse. Usually, she tucked her cigarettes away in an inside zippered compartment, to make them harder to get at and (theoretically) slow down the rate of her smoking. The last time she’d had one, though, she’d simply dumped the pack and her lighter down on top of everything else, which included her wallet, her makeup, and her totally untouched three-year-old Filofax.

  She got a cigarette out of the pack, lit up, and blew a stream of smoke into the air. The problem with being neurotically unsure of yourself, she knew, was that it tended to make you desperate, and being desperate tended to lead to periods when your life was best left unexamined. She had weathered one of those periods during the dark cold autumn of the year her second novel, Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia, had appeared in the bookstores. Maybe success was more than she could take at that point, especially because the success in question seemed so bizarrely disproportionate to the work she had done to get it. She always said she wrote fantasy novels because she didn’t want to deal with reality, but there was more to it than that. Way back then, fantasy novels had seemed to be eminently safe. There were best-selling mystery novelists. There were best-selling horror novelists. There were even best-selling literary novelists. Those people got their pictures in magazines and their names in gossip columns and all kinds of weird and importunate mail. Some of them even got rich. Fantasy novelists, on the other hand, were the priests and priestesses of a small, obscure, and incomprehensible cult. They hadn’t a hope in hell of breaking out into the mainstream.

  Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia changed all that—and worse, it managed to change it in less than a day. A day was how long it took for the 10,000 copies of the first printing to disappear from library shelves, bookstores, wholesalers, and warehouses and for the reorders to start coming in, thousands of reorders, every one of them delivered (according to Bennis’s editor) in tones of breathless, incredulous panic.

  Her publishers managed to get her book back into the stores in six weeks. The stores managed to sell out the second printing of 50,000 copies in three. All of a sudden, she was doing the kind of business most writers only dream of, and she was scared to death.

  Maybe she would have been less scared if things at home had been less bad than they were, but the publication of Chronicles coincided with what she ever afterward thought of as the hellfire period of her family’s history. Her father, already crippled by an automobile accident, had nearly been killed by another while on a winter-thaw picnic on the family estate. Her sister Emma had been all but accused of causing that accident deliberately. Her father had responded by setting up a living trust that disinherited all four of his daughters irrevocably. Then he had begun to call them up in the middle of the night, to tell them what he thought of them.

  Bennis had never had any question whatsoever about what her father thought of her. She had been hearing it, in words of four to seven letters, all her life. Still, those phone calls were nightmarish, brutal, crazy—coming out of nowhere, cutting into her sleep, leaving her sitting bolt upright in bed with the phone gone to dial tone in her hand and her teeth chattering, night after night after night.

  It was nuts, and she knew it. She couldn’t do anything about it. Every day or two, her editor sent her more reviews. Every night, her father rang up and cursed, swore, needled, screamed. It got to the point where she was afraid to answer the phone, even in the daytime, and didn’t collect the mail at all. She would have gone to Tanzania if she could have, but she couldn’t. She was in a very strange situation that began to seem stranger to her every day. She didn’t have any money.

  Since Chronicles had never been expected to be a success, she had received a very small advance for it, under $5,000. Because her father was in no mood to support her and her mother in no physical condition to hear about her problems, she couldn’t get money from home. It would be at least a year before she saw royalty money from Chronicles, and in the meantime she had $450 in her checking account, no job, and only one way to get hold of any cash: she could borrow it from the Author’s Guild. Since Bennis had a tutored horror of borrowing money, she didn’t.

  She might have been stuck forever in Boston, and driven slowly to suicide, except that a very curious thing began to happen. She began to hear from people who had probably never read a fantasy novel before, but had read this one, because at one time or another they had known her. She got letters from former classmates at Agnes Irwin, former campmates from summers on Lake Winnamachee, former fellow sufferers of the dancing classes that were the terror of every Main Line upper-class childhood life. She got letters from former teachers, former nannies, former riding instructors, former chaperones. Finally, she got a letter from a former somebody she actually remembered, and remembered that she had liked.

  This former somebody was named Rosamund Baird, and she had been Bennis’s roommate in Lawrence House their mutual freshman year at Smith College. Freshman year was as long as Rosamund had lasted, and she almost hadn’t gotten to the end of that. The only child of the richest rancher in the state of Texas, Rosamund was very well supplied with money, very wild, and very indiscreet. Smith College was a tolerant place even then, but there were limits
. Taking a Jackson Pollock off the walls of the college museum and replacing it with five framed Little Orphan Annie comic strips from the Wetherford, Texas, Gazette was definitely outside those limits.

  The return address on Rosamund’s letter was Washington, D.C.—not one of those small towns in Maryland and Virginia that Bennis could never keep straight, but the capital itself. The address was embossed at the top of the first page in curling black script. Under it, in the same purple ink used to draw the bats on the borders, was Rosamund’s private phone number. Bennis looked at it, then looked around her apartment. Small to begin with, it now looked minuscule, diminished by the accumulation of the debris of a life on the point of breaking down beyond repair. Bennis rescued the phone from under the blankets she had dropped on the floor beside her bed that morning and dialed the District of Columbia.

  On most days it would have been next to impossible to get hold of Rosamund in the middle of the afternoon, because she would have been out at the hairdresser’s getting ready for a night out. On this day, however, she was just back from her lawyers’. Her third divorce was final, her datebook said she was twenty-five years old, and she was depressed.

  “The truth is,” she told Bennis, “I’d love to have you down here for a couple of weeks. It could be a couple of months. Hell, honey, it could be a couple of years. Maybe you could talk me out of getting married the next time it occurs to me.”

  “I just hope you marry rich,” Bennis said.

  “I always marry rich. I’m not attracted to fortune hunters, Bennis, just lunatics. This last one tried to dress all my Greek statues in green underwear.”

  “Right,” Bennis said.

  “Take the plane,” Rosamund said. “I know my way to the airport. I haven’t the foggiest notion if a train station even exists in this place.”

  Then started a three-month stretch that Bennis was never able to remember in detail, but was unfortunately unable to forget completely. It had a lot of alcohol in it, and a lot of cigarettes, and the only marijuana Bennis ever smoked in her life. It also—inevitably, since Rosamund had a hand in it—had a lot of men. Bennis was fairly sure she hadn’t slept with all of these men, or even most of them, but she had slept with enough of them so that their faces blurred for her into an impressionistic pudding made up of arrogance, stupidity, and lust for power. At least, she supposed what she was seeing was lust for power. It certainly wasn’t lust for sex. To a man, these idiots had been more capable of being aroused by the sight of the presidential seal on a souvenir postcard than they ever would be by her.